THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.
[We go to church and we enter into an atmosphere of calm. The distilled wisdom of the ages is about us. The oldett narratives of human history are read in our hearing, and through all familiarity of phrase'the sincerity of the narrator forces itself upon us. The sense that we are at one with the singers of countless generations is an uplifting. Paul's exhortations stimulate our courage. In the teaching and the passion of the Gospels we follow the way of perfect life which leads to victory over death. All this may be possible in the closet. The sublimation of it may startle us as we walk along the streets. But the periodical withdrawal into these ancient houses of service, built with hands, helps us to dwell in houses not built with hands.—[The Diary of a Churchgoer. By Lord Courtney of Penwith.] THE interesting articles of the Bishop of Norwich on the proposed revision of the Prayer-book, which have lately appeared in the Spectator, suggest that a free lay opinion on the subject may not be dis- tasteful. For neither in law nor in equity is the question one for the sole disposal of the clergy. The Church is a national Society ; the Prayer-book is a national possession which, having long passed into the common thought and speech of Englishmen, is increasingly used, with or without adaptation, in Nonconformist Chapels, and cannot be revised without the assent of the English Parliament.
Yet one feels there is a difficulty. On the one hand, a scction of the Church, advancing under the banner of self-government, would like more and more to subject her doctrine and formularies to purely ecclesiastical control. And, on the other, there is a laymen's party which feels that this kind of Church bars them out. They would like to " live for Gad," as Tolstoy says, and they realize that in such a world as this the eremite's faith is im- possible, is even a little absurd. Churchgoing to them is still, in the language of the Prayer-book, the most " comfortable " as well as the most sacred happening of the week ; yet they have a suspicion that a merely devout attitude and temper are unwanted, or even resented, by a section of the clergy, unless and until they are joined to a greater definiteness about dogma than they feel or can profess. Therefore, even in their devotional intention, these people stand, like the publican, " afar off." And if the Prayer-book were pointed a little more in the direction of high sacramental doctrine, as the promoters of an alternative Communion Service desire, and the nine impassioned Anglo-Catholics behind them intend, they would fear that a form of interdict had been passed on them. They would still be under the draw and urge of the spiritual life, but they would no longer know where to go in order to satisfy it. Nonconformity chills, even repels, them. It is the individualist's creed, and in 'religion at least these men are not individualists. Nor is it a sufficient .answer to their objections to a new sacramental service that it will be optional, and that the worshipper (provided the parson and the majority of the congregation be willing) can still adhere to the old. In many parisheS, in any case, the option will not be real, in others it will be a ground of bitter contention. And it is a fair conclusion that it will be the aim of our ardent and active mediaevalists to make the new service com- pulsory, and to constitute it, rather than the " Order for Morning Prayer," the chief service for Sunday.
But it may be asked, what right have such people as I have indicated to be regarded as members of the Anglican Church at all ? Well, they have none, if the Church shuts her arms against them. They come to her by way of modern science, or philosophy, or the political life, much as Nicodemus came to her Master, ' and if their thought on these things be the cause of repulsion, they can be repelled. Take my own ° case. ..Knowing my own character as . I do, or think I do, I disbelieve that any " catastrophic " spiritual event, such as the Methodistic " conversion," is likely to happen to it. Though I believe. in the -spiritual origin of fife, I disbelieve in the possibility of professing an exact and coherent explanation of its mystery. I disbelieve in the doctrine and practice of literal Sacrameritalism, because it seems to me to sink religion in materialism, in an age wheit science is weaving, link by link, the means of escape from it. I disbelieve in (to me) unbelievable things like the Flood, and I dismiss from my mind incompreherisible things, like the Virgin Birth. So- in regard to the Bible as it is read in Church, I dislike some things in it, like the denuncia- tory Psalms, if only because they are so like my material, unregenerate self. And I stand aloof from others, such as the Pauline conception of Christ, just in proportion as I am drawn to the Christ of the Gospels.
Do such non-beliefs as these make me an anti-Christian or a non-Christian ? I do* not think so. I live in a Christian world, and though I do not live a good life there, I cannot escape from it. Its institutions surround me ; its ideal morality is the one to which I aspire ; its criticism of life seems to me an essentially living one, for it strikes the worldliness of London at precisely the same angle as it struck the worldliness of Jerusalem, and its psychology seems to freshen with every new research that science makes into the outer and the inner character of main. So that even if I desire to leave Christianity, it will not leave me.
It is as an aid to this inevitable reattachment of the modern man to religion that the value, I had almost said the necessity, of the Anglican Church, and its broader, more inclusive formularies, conies in. The English Church of to-day still offers an open door to all those who regard religion as a thing of spirit and life, not a mete.- physic ; a means of common . profession and aspiration, not merely of intensive spiritual culture. That it is a perfect organ of this spiritual aspiration no one can assert, or that its service is always at its best (as if the Bible, or Shakespeare, or anything to which man's thonght or hand gives expression, were always at their best !).
But its liturgy is a noble invocation of the finest in man ; of his charity. ; his power to forgive the injuries of others as he hopes to be forgiven his own ; of his wish for self- amendment, for escape from his besetting sins of pride, malice, envy, and that unimaginative hardness which is perhaps his ..worst fault ; of his aspiration after truth ; of his active benevolence ; of the freedom c his will, and its final surrender to the Will of God, and of the promise, as the fruit of that surrender, of a mystical, though riot inapprehensible, peace in the soul.
. This is the spiritual stuff out of which have been fashioned immortal things like the Litany, the Collect for Peace, St. Chrysostom's Prayer, the Prayer for all sorts and conditions of men, the Exhortations in the Communion Service, and the Evening Collect. And millions of English men and women, gentle and simple, have joined in these petitions for hundreds of years—school- boys dismissed with them into the twilight of winter afternoons, unlearned folk in country churches, learned ones in college chapels, all sorts and conditions of people, either as part of their spiritual routine or in some intense and decisive moment of personal or national experienCe. Doubtless they tend here' and there to be a little temporal in tone, a little naive in expression. The modern English- man no longer prays for rain or fine weather, or even fOr victory in war ; at least he has ceased to pray, for them ex animo since he got to know that the God of the universe is more and greater than a kind of Englishman's Zeus, The religions consciousness has gone on and -carried him to higher levels: But if in theSe wants and aspirations there is a modern case for the revision of the forms of the Prayer-book, there is surely none for the kind of revision which- the authors of the proposal for an alternative Communion Service have in mind. If we cannot move at a single stride up to the tremendous, perhaps the awful, idea of God that science reveals, we shall certainly not move back to the Missal and the Breviary. One can appreciate the criticism of the Prayer-book for its repetitions, - its rather mechanical use of the Scriptures, and its occasional drop, in some of the Collects, to the commonplace. If its noblest language is of the kind fit, as Mr. Shaw once said, to be read " only in Church or on the eternal hills," it does miss the devotional privacy, the intense concentration of the spiritual powers, and the rich variety of appeal to them, at which the Roman Liturgy aims, and there is nothing in it to touch the ardour of the impassioned lovers to whom we owe the wonderful ,Mozarabic Ritual.* Here, indeed, one sees the Christian soul striving to rend the veil that conceals the mystery of Divine Love. But we are moderns, the veil has re- descended on us, and the attempt to penetrate it with such guides as the author of the Athanasian Creed makes • in the end for dishonesty. This, in effect, is what the Revisionists are after. They are not content with Cranmer's magnificent work of editorship, which, while it bears clear witness to the past, has shaped our Prayer- book into an indelible landmark of religious liberty. They would like to cut out the large and noble contribu- tion which Luther and the Reformers, English and German, made to it, leaving an almost uninterrupted return track, maybe through the First Prayer-book of Edward VI. to the mediaeval formularies, and their metaphysical explanations and comments.
Here, then, the modern mind joins issue. It knows that, while nothing goes back, there is a long work of exploration to be done before we again attain one of those halting-places of the human spirit at which the Reformers arrived. In the meantime it seems an act of wisdom to keep the treasure they have handed down to us in the beautiful casket they designed. For to many the finest thing about the Prayer-book is its tendency, as a whole, not to seek to express the inexpressible, not to lay down final positions, but rather—every avenue of thought having been explored, and every means of positive faith exhausted —still to leave free scope for new disclosures of the Infinite Knowledge and Compassion. Thus knowledge of God's truth is daily prayed for as the Christian's highest good, but not as if it were already within his grasp, and " Life Everlasting " as the crown of his life on earth, but not as his certain inheritance and possession. It is this reticence, this humility of tone and attitude, which, more than anything else, keeps the National Church in touch with the times. It is useless to say that it amounts to an abandonment of the Catholic position. For a Church which cannot explain herself to the intelligence of man, and take account of its growth, is not in the largest sense of the word a Catholic Church
* Take, for example, this Collect for Matins on the Monday in Holy Week :— " Arise, 0 Lord, not from sleep, not from place, not from time, .0 infinite and eternal Watch ; that since many persecute, many harass Thy little flock, Thou, our Redeemer and Defender, wouldst be present as our Hope in the storm, our Shelter in the heat, and tread under foot the fierceness and the evil councils of them that rise up against us, and scatter the collected thousands of them that surround us."
Or this " Christ, the Son of God, who, in the extremity of Thy Passion, hadst gall and vinegar given Thee to drink by the Jews, grant to 41S that, by this the bitterness which Thou didst taste for us, we may be made joyful by drinking of the river of Thy pleasures ; to the ,end that both the bitterness of Thy death may increase the sweetness of our love, and the power of Thy resurrection may manifest to us in its perfect beauty the promised glory of Thy Face."
[See Dr. Neale's Essays on Ifiturrology and Church History.]
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